DC Metro Accident Report

Posted on March 12, 2010 by Greenberg & Bederman

Up until about a week ago, we had no idea that the Washington, D.C. subway system was the second busiest in the country. We think we can be forgiven for expressing surprise when we found this out. The car traffic in Washington, D.C. is some of the worst in the country, both in terms of gridlock and in terms of car accidents, so if you happen to spend a lot of time on the highways in Maryland, D.C. or Virginia, it would be reasonable to make the assumption that D.C. doesn’t have a busy subway system.

But we do have a subway system, and it is the second busiest, and we found this out while reading an article in the Washington Post, in which the Federal Transit Administration delivered its report on Metro safety to members of the Senate and Congress who served the D.C. metropolitan area.

The report was not a good one. It contained the results of an FTA audit that took place between December 14 and 17 of last year, and they also attended various safety workshops between January 11th and January the 13th of this year.

This audit was supposed to take place in the middle of 2010, but with all the various accidents, fires and employee deaths that have plagued the Metro rail system this year, the audit was accelerated due to the specific requests of Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood and Maryland Senator Barbara Mikulski.

According to the report, the safety audit focused on the following:

• the level and quality of coordination between TOC and WMATA to ensure safety for WMATA’s passengers and employees; and

• follow-up on three open non-compliance findings from its 2007 audit of TOC.

 

This basically means that they took a look at the ways in which the Metro agencies in the various districts (Maryland, the District and Virginia) communicate with each other and how they follow established safety protocols, and they also looked at what had been done since 2007, when Metro had received three findings of non-compliance during a similar audit that took place in that year.

So here is what they found. They found that the various state authorities, which act as a committee, have no policy in place to manage conflicts between the three jurisdictions. So safety issues that might affect the entire Metro System are handled individually according to the jurisdiction in which they might occur. Maryland might handle it differently than Virginia, who might not handle it at all, or the District might balk at surrendering some of the money necessary for a safety fix in Maryland, so the fix won’t occur. In other words, the TOC is currently is often working at cross purposes, even when it comes to rider safety.

Even when the various jurisdictions are in agreement with one another, being a member of the TOC is not exactly the most prestigious of positions. There isn’t any training available for members, and you don’t even have to have a background in transit or public safety in order to be a member. For two out of the three jurisdictions, it isn’t even a full time job; Virginia was the first to have a full time position in 2009.

This lack of decisive decision-making ability at the top has had severe detrimental effects all the way down to the bottom. The report also found that WMATA has no single point of responsibility in indentifying and reporting safety hazards, which means that a diligent and well meaning employee could see a blatant safety hazard and then report it to a supervisor, who would then report it to…who knows? Apparently, safety hazard reports in the Metro system just float around the ether, and whether or not they get acted upon is entirely based on chance. In fact, WMATA dedicates no resources to system wide hazard analysis, which, considering that the D.C. subway is the second busiest in America, is absolutely preposterous.

Unfortunately, the problems detailed here are not theoretical problems that might someday result in a bad accident. The accidents have already happened. There have been train derailments, fires in subway lines and rail employees struck and killed by trains, and this isn’t even counting the horrific accident at Fort Totten that left nine people dead and injured over eighty. Is it a possibility that this accident could have been prevented if there had been a positive risk assessment and repair system in place in the Metro system? We think that it is.

There is more to running a public transit system than just building it and letting it run. The public (who is paying for it, after all, both in terms of fares and through taxes,) deserves to have their daily transportation be as safe as possible. We apparently have not had that luxury for quite a few decades, and with that it mind it seems somewhat of a miracle that there have “only” been the accidents that have occurred recently.

Greenberg and Bederman is an injury law firm that provides legal assistance for those who have been hurt due to no fault of their own. We are currently helping people who were injured in the Fort Totten Red Line crash, and can offer our years of experience to anyone who has been injured due to negligence or incompetence due to faults in the Metro system or incompetence and indifference by Metro employees. If you or a loved one has been injured in an accident involving Metro in Maryland, Virginia or the District, contact Greenberg and Bederman for a free dc metro accident legal consultation today.

Greenberg & Bederman is located one half block from the metro station in downton Silver Spring, Maryland, one mile from the Washington, D.C. line.
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